Being Hal Ashby. Nick Dawson

cake we ate! In those days, Ashby and the rest of us were smoking a lot of pot, you know? Ashby was the champion: he pretty much had a joint in his hand at all times.”³³ John Mandel has happy memories of the group watching the television talent show Rocket to Stardom “stoned out of our heads,”³⁴ while Box nicknamed one of the places they lived during that period “The Happy House” because of all the pot they smoked there. Once when one of their less worldly friends came round and asked what the curious smell was, quick as a flash Ashby said, “We made some pea soup, and we burned it.”³⁵

      Bernard stresses that the marijuana was weak compared to modern standards but admits that Ashby still overindulged: “I think he smoked weed to excess. But it wasn't a negative effect that it had on him, it just meant he got sillier and sillier. And I never, in all those years, saw Hal as a depressed person or a loner.”³⁶ Yet while Bernard did not see his darker moments, Ashby did not manage to hide them from everybody.

      Ashby and his new crowd were all fans of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, whose narrator famously does not want to discuss “where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield crap.”³⁷ Ashby did not feel like going into any David Copperfield crap either, and with his group of Ogden friends having dispersed, he was relieved to have new friends who were unaware of his unhappy past.

      “None of us knew anything about his life before we met him,” Bernard recalls. “None of us knew that he'd had children, none of us knew he'd been married before—not a damn thing.”³⁸ But Gloria started seeing the effect of Ashby's failure to deal with issues from his past: “He was very, very moody, and he could be so funny, I mean unbelievably funny. And then turn around and be every bit as moody and heavy.” Gloria dated Ashby for some time and once met his mother (“a wonderful lady”) when she came down to visit. After Eileen's stay, it became clear to her that his unexpected bouts of depression were rooted in unresolved problems from his troubled adolescence: “It was strange, because he could have you in stitches, but alone with him, he had a lot of dark moments. He'd become very, very upset and very down. It could be prompted by very little, because I don't think it was what was happening at the moment, I think it was stuff that he was carrying around about his father and his mother. I think that Hal had some deep feelings about his father's suicide and resentments about his mother, and I'm not sure exactly why, except that I'm sure it caused him a great deal of unhappiness.”³⁹

      As he grew closer to his group of friends, Ashby learned that he was not the only one with a tragic incident in his past. Bill Otto's father had died young, and Otto blamed his mother for pushing him to work himself into an early grave. Clyde Wilson, a friend of Box's from his hometown of Bremerton, Washington, had come home one day to find his father had shot his mother and then turned the gun on himself. There was a kinship between the three of them, but Ashby revealed very little even to them. His persistent refusal to talk about his problems and accept help when it was offered resulted in him struggling with the demons of his past for the rest of his life. He could ignore them for periods of time, but when things went awry in his professional or personal life, it would become unbearable for him, as if the weight of the world had suddenly fallen on him.

      Possibly as a way of papering over the cracks, Ashby threw himself into whatever work he was doing, trying to make money while he waited for his editing break. He was seemingly willing to pursue even the most unlikely business opportunities. He went to the Los Angeles Exhibition Center to sell rubberized floor mats and became involved with Clyde in an equally oddball moneymaking scheme. “Clyde reveals one day that he has this furniture polish or household cleaning product,” recalls Box, “and it worked really well. Somehow he had the rights to it, and Hal saw this as an opportunity. So he went to Washington state with Clyde to see if they could do something with that, but I think nothing came of that. I think he would have welcomed some kind of entrepreneurial opportunity.”⁴⁰

      Ashby no doubt was frustrated to be selling household goods rather than doing something he was passionate about, but his sense of humor (he was “the champion giggler of all time,” according to Bernard)⁴¹ and enjoyment of life kept him going. “Hal had little or no cash assets but he was loaded in the humor department,” says Box. “And when the mood struck him he could have you rolling on the floor.”⁴² Ashby had a very idiosyncratic way of looking at life, comic, but with a philosophical slant. One day in the kitchen of the house in Beverly Glen, he suddenly said, “I earn $35 a week, and where does it go? Right down this garbage disposal. If this garbage disposal were an animal, it'd be the strongest beast on the face of the earth.”⁴³

      His enthusiasm for the arts was also infectious and revealed in him a knack for storytelling. “He was wonderful when he was talking about having seen Guys and Dolls or read some book and [would] retell it so wonderfully well,” enthuses Box. “It was a real treat. He remembered things in great detail and was so enthusiastic about them. His monologues created little scenes and characters.”⁴⁴ Ashby had an incredible memory for the things that interested him—he loved Broadway shows, bought the LPs of musicals, and knew all the words to West Side Story—and it was this talent that helped him bring stories so fully to life. Because listening to one of his descriptions was so enjoyable, Box says, the “book he talked about or the film he had seen might not always live up to Hal's colorful telling of it.”⁴⁵ Mandel also remembers Hal's enthusiasm and his great interest not only in art but also in people: “He was great to be with. He had a tremendous curiosity about everything and was really interested in people. He was unlike anyone I'd ever met.”⁴⁶

      A number of Ashby's friends, including Bill Otto and Ian Bernard, ended up living at the Sunset Colonial Hotel, a place that became “a center for the young Turks,” according to Bernard.⁴⁷ The author John Ridley describes the hotel as “ground zero for a bushel of fresh-off-the-bus actor and actress types…[who had] headed west with a lot of ideas on becoming stars…but not a single plan on how to reach their destination.”⁴⁸ It was seedy and therefore cheap, but Ashby had friends and other like-minded dreamers all around. What's more, they knew how to have fun. When Bill Otto got married, Ashby and Bernard snuck into the groom's room on the day of the ceremony and took all the furniture out of it. “When he came home from his honeymoon to spend the night there,” laughs Bernard, “there wasn't a stick of furniture in the room. Not even a bed. He wasn't that pleased.”⁴⁹

      Sammy Davis Jr., now a rising star, also had an apartment at the Sunset Colonial. Ashby and Davis would hang out with actors Byron Kane and Jeff Chandler, and the four formed a club called “The Face Men of America,” the name apparently referring to a certain shared sexual preference. Because Davis spent so much time on the road, he was only an occasional member of Ashby's gang but was still considered one of them. Bill Box remembers being invited along with Ashby to a party thrown by Davis after the recording of his hit song “Hey There” and seeing Sammy, one of the fastest draws in the business, showing off by twirling a pair of pistols and slamming them in their holsters. Over the years, Davis disappeared from the group as other friends became more important to him. “After he became a Rat Packer, he moved in different circles and I believe was corrupted by his own self importance,” says Bernard. “Surrounded by sycophants, he forgot the ‘little people.'”⁵⁰

      However, those in Ashby's circle were becoming successful too. The Box Card Company continued to thrive, and Box also started doing artwork for jazz albums put out by Mode Records. Ian Bernard cowrote and arranged the acclaimed albums Rain or Shine (1955) and Moondreams (1957) for singer Dick Haymes, with the latter release also featuring John Mandel. In the mid-1950s, Ashby himself made an appearance on a popular television show hosted by Art Linkletter called People Are Funny, a precursor to reality television that got its contestants to perform outrageous or zany stunts for the audience's amusement. According to Box, Ashby was given a relatively appealing task: the show sent flowers, chocolates, and other love offerings from “Your secret admirer” (i.e., Ashby) to an unsuspecting girl, and Ashby's mission was simply to bring her back to the show, which he succeeded in doing.

      Bill Otto's activities in the entertainment world, however, were